A/N: A couple of the alien blaster's features are, of course, totally made up by me. There had to be some explanation for how it could be used by the player character, whose hands are so different from the dead alien's. It strikes me as highly unlikely that a race that had achieved space travel would create these high-tech rounds only to have them last hardly any time at all (the way they do in the game). I'm taking a similar attitude toward the weapon's canonical lack of durability.

Chapter 27

It wasn't a large weapon. Smaller, probably, than the .22. Xen looked at it carefully as Charon held it out, lying across his large palm but still pointed, she observed, carefully away from her. The barrel was a pointed ellipse, like one of the old zeppelins she had seen pictures of, and the cell cradle across the top looked a little awkward there. The grip and trigger were, indeed, shaped somewhat differently than the other weapons she had seen.

Xen picked it up gingerly.

"It weighs hardly anything," she said. She snorted. "Even to me. I guess that makes sense. My third contributor is very small, and I'm fairly sure he was an adult."

Her fingers were just about long enough that she could wrap them all the way around the handle, so that her fingertips came back to her palm. The shape of the grip accommodated this perfectly. Two fingers about the grip, one to the trigger – yes, that worked. She wasn't quite sure what to do with her thumb. She laid it against the back of the handle, hoping the weapon wouldn't have much recoil. There was no hammer to cock back, and no safety catch that she could find.

As her first finger touched the trigger, the grip changed suddenly. Xen's hand twitched.

Good thing there's no power cell in it, or I'd have just shot myself in the foot.

The material felt suddenly warm under her hand. Now there was a perfect resting place for her thumb. And something in its visible spectrum had changed, just a little. She wasn't quite sure how. It didn't seem to be radiating above normal background, which was odd considering that they had found it in an irradiated area.

"It's conforming to my hand," she said. "With no power cell in it. I wonder how that works. Did it do that when you picked it up, Charon?"

"It did not," said Charon.

"I think it must be triggered chemically," Xen said thoughtfully. "Do Ghouls sweat?" Charon was wearing a glove on his right hand, but it was fingerless, presumably to allow for more sensitivity when handling weapons.

"I don't," Charon said.

"So your dermal chemistry is probably pretty far off an ordinary human's," Xen said.

"That agrees with my files," said Changeling. "Although there is considerable variation among individual Ghouls."

"Same as everybody. How many power cells do we have for this, Charon?"

"Six and one empty," said Charon.

"I strongly advise against attempting to fire the weapon at this time," Changeling said immediately.

Xen laughed. "You really don't think much of my judgment, do you? No, don't answer that. I'm not going to try and shoot it now." She carried the gun over to the packbot's cargo net and reluctantly placed it inside a rucksack. It felt surprisingly natural in her hand, unlike any human-made tool she'd ever handled. "Give me the cells, Charon."

He handed over seven little cylinders. Each had a small metal cap on the end and was made of something that looked like glass. Six contained something blue that glowed faintly. The seventh seemed clear and empty, without even a residue left inside.

"Hm," Xen said. She tilted a full cell back and forth. There was no air bubble inside. Nothing sloshed. "Changeling, have you done any spectroscopy on these?"

"Affirmative," said Changeling. "But I was unable to identify the contents. It is not an acid/metal battery of any kind, since the interior is not compartmentalized. I am unable to get a read on any individual compound. I suspect the molecular contents may be sufficiently energetic that my sensor cannot isolate them."

"I guess that's not surprising," Xen said. "Whatever it is, it's well-contained. They're cold. Which strikes me as a very, very good reason not to try and open one up." She tucked the cells into an inside compartment, separate from the gun, and turned back to the others. The night was wearing on. Far overhead, a cloud had mostly blotted out the stars.

"Glad to hear it," said Bell, who had been silent for some time. She stood in what was becoming a typical posture for her, straight-backed with her arms folded. It made her seem taller than she was, even with her stocky frame. "I'd be happy to never see another fucking chemical spill."

"How are you doing now?" Xen asked at once.

"I'm... working on it." Bell's voice never seemed very expressive. Xen guessed her makers had chosen not to spend much time on voice modulation for a laboratory assistant.

Or, more likely, she's just feeling too many things that the modulator's software can't translate into human emotion. Xen found herself inclining more toward this theory. The very concept of dual experience – of positronic versus other, basal memories, some of them changeable, some not – was strange and frightening to contemplate for an organic person. The fact that Bell didn't come across as raving insane therefore meant her perceptions were very different from Xen's.

"Is there anything I can do to help you?" she asked. "Is it better or worse if I talk to you now?"

"I don't know," Bell said. "I'm not sure how I should relate to you. I'm trying to build a new socialization category because my others have gone to shit." She ran her hands through her short hair again, a familiar gesture of tense frustration. "You're not an android or a robot. I can fit your friends into those categories even if they're not technically true in Charon's case, because that's how he responds to you." Which, Xen thought with some interest, explained why the android seemed so comfortable with the Ghoul even after the violence she'd seen him carry out.

"Sometimes you talk like the techs and the supervisors, but I fucking hated them, and I don't hate you," Bell went on. "I don't want you to die from electric shock or anaphylaxis or seizures or whatever -"

"Maybe I shouldn't have told you about those," Xen said.

"- You talk to me like I'm another person. That's not something I'm used to."

"Well, you are another person," Xen said reasonably. "As much as I am, anyway. Just made from different materials."

"Dat may be a dangerous assumption to make," Charon said. He was looking at Bell, not at her.

Xen looked at him in surprise. "What?"

"You also suffer from a shortage of interaction categories," Changeling said from beside her. "Specifically, you tend to assume that everyone you meet is, to a greater or lesser extent, a robot."

"Actually, I think that's true," Bell said. She was looking marginally less tense. "You do that."

"That's not an unreasonable conclusion on my part, if we're talking about empirical experience," Xen pointed out. "Almost everybody I've met so far that hasn't directly wanted me dead has been a robot, to a greater or lesser extent. Charon, you're in sort of a class by yourself because you're an organic with a set of rules that resemble programming, but I'm still working at just letting you be you."

"That's actually pretty safe," Bell said. "Because Charon doesn't have the problem I have."

"What problem?" Xen asked.

"I have a self-determinative malfunction, remember?" Bell said. "I don't have the framework that used to keep me from having to make decisions for myself. And now I can't be sure I'll make the right decisions."

"But Charon does make decisions," Xen said. "He just does it within... specific... limits..." She looked at the Ghoul uncomfortably. He looked back without expression. "Oh. I'm sorry."

"Dere is no reason for dat," Charon said. "I am what I am. Dere is not'ing else."

"But I don't know what I am any more," Bell said. "You see? And I don't know how to find out. That's not a problem any robot has to deal with. It's an android problem."

Xen walked slowly across the clearing until she was looking up at Bell from a foot or so away.

"Bell, that's a human problem, too," she said. "Or at least it's a hybrid's problem. Why do you think I came all the way out here, built Changeling and hired Charon and all the rest of it? It wasn't for my health, I can tell you that. I've been self-determinative for seventeen years, and I still don't know what I am." Xen shrugged. "Maybe I never will. Maybe there's no category for you or me." It was hard to say, but she couldn't have said it at all four months previously.

"I hope you're wrong," Bell said, looking down at her. Her face was not expressive, but the lines it was set in said pain. "I'm not sure I can operate with no parameters."

"I don't operate with no parameters," Xen said. "And that's just ignoring the obvious physical ones. I try to be fair to people who take orders from me. I'm learning not to put them in danger for no reason. I don't kill anything or – and this is important – let Charon kill anything if it isn't absolutely necessary. And I learn. Everything I can, from anybody I can get it from. That's important to me. You just have to decide what's important to you. What do you want?"

"I want to stay alive," Bell said slowly. "I want never to go back to the Institute. I don't want to be owned by anyone." The light behind her eye flicked off and on again, just once. "And I don't want to be alone."

"There are a lot of complicated things happening inside you, I can tell," Xen said. "But the things you just said? Those are simple. Primary directive simple. If you use those as a basis, you can probably work in the socialization around them. Most humans do, and they're operating with a lot less conscious control than you have. If you don't have autonomic systems, then you've got to have more processing power than a human brain, because you're not just standing in one place telling yourself to keep running – like those neural implant people you told us about."

"All you've seen me do so far is walk and talk," Bell said. She folded her arms again, but the way she shifted her weight to one foot suggested less tension. "I froze up when you got shot, you know. I probably will next time something serious happens, too."

"That probably won't hurt us," Xen said. She thought she did a fairly good job, for someone who wasn't used to lying. "Charon and Changeling can deal with most things. And if they can't, there's probably not much you could do anyway."

Bell's smile said she wasn't fooled. "You're an odd little person," Bell said. "But I think I like you."

"I like you, too," Xen said, and realized this was the truth. "I guess I might as well try and get a couple of hours' sleep. I am tired."

"Not an uncommon side effect of electric shock," Changeling said. Xen went to dig out the olive drab blanket, which by this time was showing definite signs of wear.

"Charon, you should probably eat something," Xen said. And with that, she staggered over to the largest tree she could find and did her best to make herself comfortable among the roots. The earthy smell was odd, after so many years lived among stone and concrete, but it was not unpleasant. She fell asleep surprisingly quickly.